Ensuring quality of care for children who spend their day with more than one provider is a juggling act in itself. Anne Wiltsher reports on a pilot scheme
Explaining 'wraparound care' is difficult. It sounds kind of warm and cosy. Does it involve blankets? A tender embrace? Perhaps it's a form of therapy? It is, in fact, a term long used by childcare practitioners to describe the 'add on' care provided before and after the hours a child spends at nursery or school. And it is now an official aim of the Department for Education and Employment to extend public provision of nursery education (part-time places for four-year-olds, and all three-year-olds by 2004) to accommodate parents who are working or training.
To test out how wraparound care could work, the Government has set up five three-year pilot projects in Kirklees, York, Cornwall, Lancashire and Ealing, London, to run until March 2003. York has perhaps the most ambitious project.
Covering all 51 primary schools in the city over three years, the LEA, working closely with the local Early Years Development and Childcare Partnership (EYDCP), is planning to raise the school entry age to the term after a child's fifth birthday and create part-time nursery education places and wraparound care for children aged three and upwards. Parents will have to pay for the wraparound element at the end of the pilot. Only 19 schools have their own nursery units, so many education places will have to be created for three-year- olds.
The DfEE is working closely with the project, taking particular responsibility for the time-consuming process of accessing funding streams to finance it. Five schools will start the new regime in September 2001.
'We are inviting schools to form mini-partnerships with voluntary and independent providers,' says EYDCP lead officer Heather Marsland. 'With help from the DfEE, they are auditing families' needs and planning local provision. This will vary - we don't want to have a centralised model.'
Of the first five schools:
- One is converting an empty caretaker's bungalow into a nursery unit which a private provider will run, providing nursery education and wraparound care according to demand.
- Another which has its own nursery unit is inviting playgroups to use facilities on site (instead of the church hall) to provide wraparound care.
- Another with a nursery unit but little space is looking at providers within walking distance.
- A fourth has a parents, babies and toddlers club as well as a playgroup offering nursery education places on site, plus a nursery school and a pre-school offering daycare nearby. At all these schools parents will also be advised on how to access a childminder. Leaflets will detail the different options for early years care.
The fifth school, Tang Hall Primary, which was already developing a wing for early education, will have a toddlers group on site as well as a playgroup to provide wraparound care. The head, Paul Prest, says, 'There can be a uniqueness about parents running their own playgroups. We don't want to eat groups up, we want to work with them.'
Parents in York have expressed relief that children are starting formal education later, says Heather Marsland. 'At public meetings when I say I've seen children being picked up from school asleep, they all nod in agreement. They know we're exhausting our little ones.
'We want to maintain choice because some children are happier with childminders in home settings. The last thing parents want is institutionalised sausage-factory care from 8am to 6pm.'
Providers' relationships
Heather concedes that the initial meetings between different types of providers involved a lot of defensive arm-folding. But she says, 'Once you start making relationships with other sectors you can move mountains. We want to get away from this fighting for children that started in the 1980s with falling rolls and local management of schools.'
One worry is how to ensure that the quality of provision is uniform. Another is the difference in pay and conditions for different types of early years practitioners. But Heather Marsland is hoping the authority might provide a model for others to follow. 'Even if this isn't the case,' she says, 'just rekindling the relationships between different providers has produced tremendous energy.'
In Kirklees, one of the five wraparound schemes is in a Sure Start area and will use childminders in an innovative way. As well as looking after children in the childminders' homes and taking them to nursery classes and the Sure Start centre, which has an Ofsted-inspected playgroup, childminders will also run a wraparound session at the centre.
Registration is one of the practical problems that project manager Sue Marsden is encountering. She says, 'Kirklees defines wraparound care as sessional, which it isn't. The authority needs to look at a format that suits the care that's being provided. The concern is that this is daycare by the backdoor, and the quality isn't good enough. Providers need guidance on premises. There needs to be a rest area, an outside play area and somewhere to prepare food.
'Lack of school lunches for the under-fives is another problem. Parents have to either provide a packed lunch or pay about 10 a week for it. Also, some special needs children may need hot meals.'
Impact on children
Sue says it is difficult explaining to providers and parents what wraparound care is. 'They think it is all right to carry on doing exactly the same as in the nursery education sessions. But the children need to relax and recuperate.
They need to be able to do what they want, but with continuity of staff. 'What is needed is a seam-free transition for children. It doesn't matter what the settings are, as long as it flows.'
Asked if it would not be easier simply to extend school nursery classes, especially as the demand is only for part-time childcare in Kirklees, Sue says, 'I'm very against three year olds having a full nursery day - although it might be all right if the staff were appropriate and the building suitable.'
Finding suitable premises can be another problem. One excellent private provider was all set to provide wraparound care until the lessor of its new building pulled out at the last moment. 'The local authority won't register a building with a short lease because it affects continuity for the children,' says Sue. 'The provider has even tried to buy a building, but was pipped by a developer. They're up against the commercial sector.'
Then there is the ever-present cloud of sustainability. Parents will have to pay for wraparound care once the pilot is over, and Sue says there is 'a long way to go' to get them to take up Working Families Tax Credit.
But Kate Whelan, head of the Early Years Education Centre in Southall, which comprises three nursery schools and is part of the Ealing pilot, has seen how wraparound care can benefit isolated and deprived children. She says, 'You can see that it builds up their confidence and communication skills by being in a group that is smaller than the nursery class for breakfast and lunch. Sitting down and relating to an adult makes a difference. One child with speech difficulties improved in six weeks.'
The pilot has enabled children in the greatest need to be offered places, rather than just those whose parents are able to pay, she says. Half come from lone-parent families and the parents are either doing literacy or numeracy training, or have younger children. Some of the parents say the only people they can talk to about their problems are the staff at the centre.
Nursery schools in some pilots are being encouraged to develop their own breakfast, lunch and after-school clubs and have been told they can raise charges. This makes life simpler as all staff are employed by one body, children are on one site and there's a better chance of staff continuity.
Depending on your point of view, wraparound care is a creative way of building on resources, a celebration of diversity and an approach that gives parents plenty of choice. Or it's a rag- bag of provision with an artificial divide between care and education that makes a quality-controlled, holistic service for children with equitable staff pay and conditions almost impossible to create. Whatever it is, one thing is certain. It ain't simple.
